Gettysburg addressed

It's the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg today, and by one of those amazing coincidences a book about the battle just dropped into David Brooks's Kindle. It's got tons of quotes from letters by the soldiers, so a column ought to virtually write itself.

Unfortunately Allen Guelzo's new Gettysburg: The Last Invasion turns out to be kind of negative. Some of the things it has to say about the soldiers are really not very nice. Much better to turn to James McPherson's For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, from 1998, which explains that the warriors were motivated by

“patriotism, ideology, concepts of duty, honor, manhood and community.” The soldiers were intensely political. Newspapers were desperately sought after in camp. Between battles, several regiments held formal debates on subjects like the constitutional issues raised by the war. “Ideological motifs almost leap from many pages of these documents,” McPherson reports. “It is government against anarchy, law against disorder,” a Philadelphia printer wrote, explaining his desire to fight. [jump]

Image from Petey and Petunia.

The letters were also explicitly moralistic. “The consciousness of duty was pervasive in Victorian America,” McPherson writes. The letters were studded with the language of personal honor, and, above all, a desire to sacrifice, as one soldier put it, “personal feelings and inclinations to ... my duty in the hour of danger.”

Gertrude Himmelfarb's 19th century, when everybody was so solemn and good! (Gertrude ought to know, she was there. And still is! That's why young William fell in love with Sarah Palin, she was just like Mom, such a Young Pioneer!)

These letter writers, and many of the men at Gettysburg, were not just different than most of us today because their language was more high flown and earnest. There was probably also a greater covenantal consciousness, a belief that they were born in a state of indebtedness to an ongoing project, and they would inevitably be called upon to pay these debts, to come square with the country, even at the cost of their lives.

Makes today’s special interest politics look kind of pathetic.

Doesn't it? The way those special interest groups, like women, or black people, or people with jobs, or combinations of all the above try to legislate and litigate for their own parochial desire to be the equal of, say David Brooks, when they could be out on the field of loyalty and honor sacrificing 8,000 lives in a couple of days, and 30,000-odd more wounded or missing!

And they really were different from you and me, reader, because Brooks thinks "there was probably" a "greater covenantal consciousness". That's the authentic Brooksian inference, huh?

Here are some of the glorious Gettysburg participants according to Guelzo, practically randomly selected:

"It was nothing but the nigar lovers of the North who took [McLellan] from us," lamented a corporal in the Philadelphia Brigade.... In the Irish Brigade, there was a lingering resentment at the way they had been "driven to mere slaughter" for the sake of "cursed Yankees" and "savage blacks."

I guess some were more covenantal than others.

Brooks has actually read, or reread, or remembered quite a lot of different books for today's effusions.

One is by the eminent classicist and less than eminent National Review columnist Dr. Victor Davis Hanson on The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Ancient Greece, and the topic of soiling oneself in the midst of slaughter, which happened both to ancient hoplites and Gettysburg combatants. The passage cites Aristophanes' Peace on war, "the terrible one, the tough one, the one upon the legs."*  The book is from 2009 and the shit passage must have clung in Brooks's mind all this time.

Another is Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, and represents the hippie view of war:

abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Brooks doesn't actually quote it, merely describes the passage, and incongruously adds,  to "obscene", an accurate but rather weakening adjective: "pretentious". Hemingway represents here the awful post-Himmelfarbian disposition, or what ultramontane Catholics used to refer to (with horror) as modernism. Me, I'm with Papa.

*Other translations have a different reading: "the terrible, he with shield of tough bull's hide, he there [breaking their] legs!" or "so formidable, so cruel, so stalwart, so solid on his legs." Shit is obviously not something Aristophanes would hesitate to write about, but it would make this passage awfully elliptical even by Aristophanean standards—the text says the War on the legs, not the feces—so I don't know about Hanson's interpretation.

Gettysburg reunion (uncredited), from Little Black Star.